A blog for students of Professor Kagan's internet course to comment and highlight class topics. From the various channels for marketing on the internet, to multimedia and e-commerce business models, anything related to the class is fair game.

Saturday, July 22, 2017

Window shopping in the Amazon Age

This article touches on the latest addition to amazon’s list
of offerings to keep users within its ecosystem – Amazon Spark. This social
network feed provides its core users (If you have an Amazon Prime account, you
qualify for that tag) with a platform to share stories, pictures and ideas on
their purchases in a manner akin to an Instagram feed.

The idea here is that
users with access to Amazon Spark can now “discover” purchase ideas, much in
the same way a person discovers certain products of interest while browsing
through the stores in a mall. The advantage of Amazon Spark is that, along with
these product ideas are associated reviews from shoppers who have bought and
used the product. In other words, a virtual window-shopping experience with user reviews attached to each product encountered in the process.

The big question here is whether this new service will not
be a turn-off to users who feel like they are being barraged with
recommendations and purchase ideas they do not want and cannot trust because
there is no human connection to a purchase recommendation from a friend.
Instead, these purchase ideas would seem to come from an algorithm that does
not offer the same level of personalized interest to the targeted potential
customers that something like an Instagram recommendation or Facebook “like” of
a product by a friend would generate.

In fairness, this new feed from Amazon is probably
a decent first step to creating some order (or a better guide) for navigating the
chaos that is the amazon browsing experience. Quite frankly, the only thing
worse than an attempt to browse Amazon.com is probably an attempt to browse
Walmart.com. For that, I wish you loads of patience and plenty of luck.
Consider finding that needle in the haystack. You have a better shot at it!